Lexington

Paleocon Pat

The brawler's back, with a new appeal to nativism

WHEN it comes to cringe-making interviews, no one beats Sacha Baron Cohen. In the guise of Ali G, a black chat-show host with a penchant for bling, shell-suits, wrap-around sunglasses and grammatical train-wrecks, the British comedian has managed (God knows how) to interview some big-name Americans. Most of his interviewees come off looking pretty silly. But Pat Buchanan more than holds his own.

Mr Buchanan gently corrects Mr G's impression that he was once president of the United States. And he deftly deals with his confusion between WMDs and BLTs. “Is you mashed or something?” Mr G asks the 67-year-old lion of social conservatism towards the end of the interview. “You're like so giggly.” “I had a little puff before, sure,” Mr Buchanan replies.

Whatever he is smoking, it certainly works. Mr Buchanan is one of the great survivors of American politics. He started his political career in the Nixon White House, as a speech-writer to both Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who resigned in disgrace, and Richard Nixon, who resigned in even bigger disgrace. But he has remained a loud voice on the political scene.

He became a star pundit, not just as a columnist but also as a founder of CNN's shout-fest, “Crossfire”. He also kept drifting back into politics—first as Ronald Reagan's head of communications in 1985-87 and then, in 1992, 1996 and 2000, as a perennial presidential candidate. In 1992 he won 37% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, securing himself a chance to declare a culture war in a prime-time spot at the Republican convention; and in 1996, boasting that “The peasants are coming with pitchforks,” he beat Bob Dole in New Hampshire.

For most of the Bush years he has been a thorn in the president's side. Mr Buchanan dislikes almost everything that George Bush stands for, from his big-spending ways (“We do not consider ‘Big Government conservatism' a philosophy. We consider it a heresy”) to, above all, his foreign policy.

Mr Buchanan champions an “America first” policy, a phrase that he has unashamedly borrowed from critics of America's intervention in the second world war. He warns against the imperial temptation (one of his books is called “A Republic, Not an Empire”). And he worries that America is stirring up a hornets' nest in the Middle East: “Anti-colonial and anti-imperial terror seems to be one of the few occupations at which Arab and Islamic peoples are proficient and successful.”

And now Pat is back, with a book on the bestseller list, a successful book tour and throngs of people queuing up to tell him that he was right all along. Many of Mr Buchanan's dark warnings about intervention in the Middle East have proved all too prescient. The public's mood is as sour as it has been in years. And one of Mr Buchanan's signature issues—uncontrolled immigration—has caught fire with the public.

His new book—“State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America”—is a typical exercise in talk-show hyperbole. He does not just argue that immigration policy is a mess, and that there are too many illegal immigrants. He argues that the wrong sort of people are getting into America—Mexicans from south of the border rather than people from European stock. And he argues that these Mexicans are engaged in a process of reverse colonisation—a Reconquista of the south-west—recapturing the lands lost in the Texas war of independence of 1835-36 and the Mexican-American war of 1846-48.

Nonsense, perhaps—but nonsense that taps into a deep seam of nativism and negativism. If the 2002 mid-term elections were the “neoconservative moment” in American politics, the 2006 mid-terms are in danger of becoming the “paleoconservative moment”.

This is bad news for the Republican Party. If a wall is erected against newcomers from south of the border, this will not only reverse the party's gains among Hispanics—Mr Bush increased his Hispanic vote to around 40% in 2004—but will also drive a wedge between business Republicans, who support immigration, and social conservatives, who tend to oppose it. The danger of a Buchanan-style pitchfork rebellion from the party's nativist wing in 2008 grows by the day.

Not a wall, but a ladder

And Buchananism is bad for America, too. Mr Buchanan is right to argue that the immigration system is a disaster, and that a country cannot survive if it is nothing more than a “polyglot boarding house”. And he is right to chastise America's elites for indulging in a trite multiculturalism. But his analysis of the immigration problem is not just misguided: it is a recipe for disaster.

The only way to deal with the economics of immigration is to bring it within the law: to give workers a ladder to citizenship and immigrant-dependent industries, such as agriculture and hotels, a realistic framework for employing immigrants legally. For a while it looked as if the Senate might pass just such a sensible compromise. But the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party in the House went into revolt, and Congress now seems to have dropped the subject.

The only way to deal with the threat of Balkanisation is to emphasise assimilation. Signs abound that Mexican immigrants are happy with the American creed. They are optimistic, family-oriented, culturally conservative and religious. They come to America in pursuit of work, not reconquest. The biggest danger of Balkanisation comes not from Mexican immigrants but from people like Mr Buchanan, who specialise in dividing America even as they claim to be trying to unite it.

Mr Buchanan remains in the wilderness, despite his boundless enthusiasm for appearing on talk shows, mainstream and otherwise. The problem is that all too many Americans, from Congress down, are making the trek to join him.